With the ever changing wireless cellular technology to offer the end consumer more advanced and flexible services, new radio technologies emerge frequently to meet that demand. Whether it is higher bandwidth requirement or additional applications and services, the mobile handset is becoming more and more complex in its functionality and its operation. It is crucial for a wireless service provider to keep the user experience and quality of service at the highest possible level, and avoid high churn factors that lead to loss of revenue and lower valuation. Maintaining the end consumer relationship with the network operator is key to the business success.
With such advancement, Mobile operators are faced with new challenges in supporting the mobile device and the cellular network as faster networks are deployed and as more capable devices are introduced. Such challenges include controlling and monitoring third party applications installed on the handset, managing radio coverage across different technologies in the same network and the same handset, and tracking consumer activities and specialized events. With the capability of installing applications, tools and other software on the mobile handset, proliferation of the mobile devices with these sophisticated capabilities increases the complexity of managing the devices, services and applications that reside on them. The cost of customer care of smart phones is rising as more support becomes necessary in configuring settings, setting of data, upgrading applications and programs. In addition, it is becoming more and more difficult to the network to control which applications are installed on the mobile device and what problem they may cause to the Operating System (OS), and eventually propagate the damage to other mobile devices, hence escalating the problem that may lead to unsolvable disasters. This problem is presently addressed by having the end consumer call customer service. A major drawback of this solution is the customer service representative does not have visibility on what applications are running on the mobile handset, and in most cases cannot resolve the problem over the phone. This requires the consumer to go to a local store where further investigation may be done, and in most cases lead to replacing the handset with a new one without solving the problem or narrowing down the source of the problem. This resolution process has been proven to be very long and requiring a long interaction with the end consumer whom then is impacted with bad quality of experience. What is needed is a method and system to facilitate the cellular network operations, drive operational cost down, and optimize the network in a dynamic, highly accurate and cost efficient way.
In addition, another problem is present in the wireless networks today when it comes to monitoring the performance of applications, especially the real-time applications such as voice and video calling, running on the mobile headsets in the field, and creating an association of that performance with the location of the mobile and the radio technology used at the time of running the application. This includes session setup delay, application crash rate, packet loss ratio and overall service quality. This is desperately needed for network and service performance optimizing that directly impacts the user experience and satisfaction leading to higher revenue and lower customer churn rates. There is no known solution that resolves this problem today for applications running on the handset.
Furthermore, with new radio technologies being deployed, constantly changing geography in cities while adding building, bridges and more, variation in mobile geographical population, and new cell site deployments, the cellular radio coverage quality and accuracy is regularly changing before, during and after a radio access technology is deployed. This causes a critical problem to the operator as where there is lack or weakness of radio coverage, there is a lack of service or at best a very bad quality service. This is one of main reasons end consumers may cancel a service subscription with the current operator, hence leading to loss of revenue to that operator. This problem is addressed today with a radio drive test service that network operators utilize. The radio drive test requires vehicles equipped with radio strength detectors to drive on the road and capture the radio strength in various areas of the network. The vehicles must drive and cover as much area as possible to make sure they gather enough data. This solution is extremely expensive and time consuming given that it requires owning, operating and servicing hundreds of fuel operated vehicles to drive long distances for multiple days, and in case of covering nation-wide networks, the cost becomes much higher. In addition, this solution does not cover inside buildings, private properties and areas where roads are not available, hence making the radio coverage map not accurate.
What is needed at the network operator is a method and solution for the network to get awareness of what applications are running on a specific mobile handset, and a capability to remotely control that mobile handset in order to resolve a specific problem or pro-actively prevent a problem from spreading to other applications and modules within the mobile handset, or spreading to other mobile handset devices within the network. This method should also allow the network operator to control a single mobile device as well as multiple mobile devices during a single session. In other words, sending a request or command from the network server to the mobile device must be allowed to be done on a single mobile handset, or automatically populated to multiple mobile handsets.
What is also needed is a method and system for the mobile handset to transmit data reports regularly, as well as upon request from the network, to a network entity server where the network operator may process the information and intelligently derive a solution to specific problems.
What is also needed is a method and solution to accurately capture the radio coverage and status in the complete network and optimize the network in its operation and design of radio coverage at a much lower cost and much faster turn-around than existing solutions used today.
What is also needed is a solution and method that may monitor and report performance information for applications running on the handset and an association of those statistics with the radio technology, location of the mobile handset and other handset parameters.
A need exists, therefore, for a solution to the many problems that the network operator is facing today with the ever evolving wireless service technology, and a solution that reduces the network operational cost dramatically. The solution described in the current disclosure addresses all the problems and offers an end to end solution in a cost effective implementation while meeting all the needs described above.
All references cited herein are incorporated by reference to the maximum extent allowable by law. To the extent a reference may not be fully incorporated herein, it is incorporated by reference for background purposes and indicative of the knowledge of one of ordinary skill in the art.